This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 2nd,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. The Biden administration is out with a

massive executive order seeking to set the terms for artificial

intelligence in the US. How much attention does the Biden team give to the

possibility of forestalling AI's large upside potential. There's a signal and abandonment of America's permissionless

approach to tech.

Caters Jack Solaway and Jennifer Huddleston discuss what's in it.

This has been sort of a long time coming and tell me does this seem remarkably early for a

White House to come out with a hundred pages of executive order on a new technology that has

essentially just barely even emerged. It does and it doesn't. So this document is

coming out the same week of a significant US UK

summit on AI. So on the one hand this is clearly this administration kind of going into that summit signaling with what their view on this

topic is.

On the other hand, you are exactly right, Caleb.

This is an emerging technology that has a lot of potential applications and a lot of potential benefits.

It seems really early to be trying to fit it into a regulatory box, especially when what we've learned in the past with technology

is that maintaining that light touch approach, clearly identifying where those harms may be, and trying to only regulate on the margins of those harms and

allow the technology to benefit consumers and be developed by the market has

really allowed the US to be one of the great

innovators in a lot of different spaces and really benefited both us as consumers as

well as the economic investment in these companies.

Jack, it seems a bit like the White House is trying to get out ahead of this

...